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[Economy] Cheque Truncation System (CTS-2010): Meaning, Advantages explained
- What is cheque clearing house?
- What is MICR code?
- What is Cheque Truncation System (CTS)?
- What are the benefits of Cheque Truncation?
- CTS-2010
What is cheque clearing house?
- Suppose a party from Delhi pays you via cheque of Citibank and you have account in SBI, Ahmedabad. You deposit this cheque in your area’s SBI branch.
- Now the SBI branch manager would send his [overworked, underpaid] Bank PO to Citibank’s office in A’bad. He’d show the cheque, collect the cash and return to deposit the money in your account.
- But SBI would be getting thosands of cheques everyday- some from ICICI, some from Citibank, some from axis and so on. SBI cannot send its staff to every other bank to get the cash, that’d be extremely time consuming.
- Therefore To simplify this cheque transection process, each bank will send a representative to a central place and exchange cheques drawn on each other.
- This centralized place is called clearing house/processing house.
- Reserve bank of India is act as clearing house.
- In cities where RBI’s office doesnot exist, usually SBI or other public sector bank acts as the clearing house.
What is MICR code?
- By seeing the PIN code, a postman can know the destination of an envelope. Same way by using the MICR code, RBI (clearing house) can know the name of a bank, location of its branch from where the cheque was issued= faster clearing of cheques.
- MICR = Magnetic ink character recognition.
- At the bottom of every cheque, you’d see some black colored numbers with weird looking fonts. That is the MICR code.
- These numbers are printed with a special ink containing iron oxide, so that it can be automatically read by a special machine.
- Ofcourse this sounds similar to bar codes, but there is a difference: unlike barcode, you can read the MICR code and decode it, without the use of special machines.

What is Cheque Truncation System (CTS)?
- Under the old paper cheque based clearing, the SBI bank will send the paper cheque to the clearing house and get the money and then transfer it to your account.
- This is still time consuming. because SBI (or any bank) would need to physically move the cheques to a clearing house.
- So RBI came up with a new idea known as ‘Cheque Truncation System (CTS)’.
- In this Cheque Truncation System (CTS), SBI branch will not send the paper cheque to the clearing house, but instead, it’d merely scan the cheque, and electronically send the image + MICR data, to the clearing house.
- From the clearing house, the data would goto the paying bank (Citibank in our example), they will inspect the MICR data, signature on the scanned image and release the money to SBI.
- This process is faster and more safer than the conventional paper-cheque clearing method.
What are the benefits of Cheque Truncation?
- It Eliminates the time, money and manpower wasted during physical movement of cheques (from banks to clearing house).
- Thus, Cheque Truncation =faster clearing = better service to customers,
- Cheque Truncation system reduces the scope for clearing-related frauds
- There is no fear of losing cheque in transit.
CTS-2010
- In the year 2010, RBI came up with the guidelines for Cheque Truncation system. (CTS 2010)
- The banks would need to upgrade a few things to comply with CTS 2010 standards of RBI.
- For example, in their branch offices, they would need to buy scanners and install special software provided by RBI, to securely transfer and receive the scanned image and data.
- They may need to change the color-scheme of chequebooks so that signature and handwriting is visible in the scanned image. And so on…
- Problem: some jholachhaap banks, are yet to comply with RBI’s CTS 2010 guidelines.
- Hence recently RBI issued a warning to all banks: upgrade your banking infrastructure according to CTS 2010 guidelines, before the end of Sept. 2012
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awesome
i cant stop laughing…”some zolchap companies”..:D
Mrunal sir kudos to u.Really one of the best blog.I am an engineering graduate.I always had a fear of these financial terms.Bt i was keen to know these concepts.Now by the grace of god i am here.Thankyou very much for simplifying these things.
Sir i want to know how RBI regulates foreign currency marketand In how many ways?Is there any article related to this?please let me know.
Simple and good to understand.
Thanks for sharing this article.
It is simple clear explain. .more useful for me thanks
Not any message
Simple and good to understand.
Thanks for sharing this article.
From today onwards you would be called as “King of Cheques”
ur article was very helpful to understand the concept of CTS for cheques. Is it also necessary/mandatory to have these words” payable at par” mentioned on the cheques of any bank?
Well explained. Iam elated tht I finally understand such concepts and its easy to remember them as well.
Explian of cheque Advantage & Dis Advantags In Telugu
Sir,
Can you please let me know order of study in each topic.
Is it top->bottom or bottom to top ?
Thanks,
sai
very easily explained with real example. thanks.
Very crisply and nicely explained… like a story teller…
This is cool. I posses the some knowledge from website. Thank you for the support to me understand that topics.
Shailesh
Thank you for explain it in simple lannguage with example good job sir
What is the role of NPCI in CTS?
I loved the line, overworked underpaid!
In spite of sending the image of a cheque for payment if a grossly higher payment is made (say instead of rs 4500 the service center issues advice to pay rs 45000 then the onus of correction is on which bank 7 what is the stipulated time frame to resolve such matter
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